“Ghost tours,” she said, distractedly. She was not a big fan of ghosts, but at least they couldn’t hurt you physically. Vampires were another story. “Jesus.”
She moved down the ranks of coffins. She knelt down and drifted her hand over the top of one. A lumpy stalagmite had grown on its lid where water dripping from above had left mineral deposits over the years. Her hand felt cold and clammy as it passed over the weathered wood of the lid, and she felt her stomach churn as she stepped closer. It wasn’t like when she’d approached Malvern’s coffin back in the hotel room, however. The feeling wasn’t as strong. This felt more like an echo of evil that had passed by long ago.
“You must know the history of this town pretty well,” she said. “You ever hear any stories about vampires at the Battle of Gettysburg?”
He shook his head. “No, nothing like that.”
“I take it this is the first time anyone’s found a vampire crypt here, then.”
He laughed at the idea. “Yes, and we never expected to. Most of the battlefield’s been played out for decades. You don’t expect to find anything anymore except the occasional bullet or maybe the tin badge off some dead guy’s hat. There aren’t a lot of mysteries left here, which is what makes this so incredible.”
She had to open the coffin. She had to see what was inside. She didn’t want to—she had to. There were so many of them. If there were vampires in all of the coffins, what could they possibly do? How could they possibly fight back? She did a quick count. The coffins were laid out in long, neat rows, five of them across and ten… fifteen…twenty deep. That made an even hundred. A hundred vampires wouldn’t just be a problem. They would be an army. An army of blood-fueled killing machines.
A year earlier Caxton had helped Arkeley destroy four vampires and it had cost both of them dearly. It had destroyed his body and nearly taken her sanity. She had done things—horrible things—that she tried to never think about, but that she relived endlessly in her dreams. She had been infected with the vampiric curse. She had nearly become one of them herself. The four vampires had done so much evil in just a few short days while Arkeley had played a deadly game of catch-up, following them from one bloodbath to another, walking right into the fiendish traps they left for him, with Caxton held out like squirming bait for them the whole time.
Four—just four—had destroyed both their lives. A hundred vampires would have torn them to pieces without blinking.
A wave of unreality passed through her, a feeling of sheer impossibility. This couldn’t be happening. It might be a dream or some kind of hallucination. She counted the coffins again and got the same number.
“Isn’t it just gorgeous? Professor Geistdoerfer made sure he was the first one down here,” Montrose said, looking at her sheepishly. “He wanted to make sure it was his name at the top of the paper when he wrote this place up. I’m just glad to be part of this—I love a good juicy mystery.”
She stared at him. What was he babbling about? Did he even know what a real living vampire was capable of? Most people didn’t. Most people seemed to think they were like paler versions of Romantic poets. That they dressed in lace shirts and sipped red wine. That they would deign, from time to time, to nibble at somebody’s neck with delicate little fangs.
She grasped the edge of the nearest coffin lid. It felt like ice in her hands. She lifted and heaved and the battered old wood started to give way.
“Hey! You can’t do that! That has to be fully cataloged before we open it up.”
She grunted and threw the lid back on its rusted hinges. The lid shrieked and the metal hardware snapped. With a clatter that echoed around the cavern the lid smashed to the floor. Caxton leaned over the open coffin and stared down at its contents.
A skull looked back at her, its mouth open in a dreadful grin. The eye sockets and cheekbones looked mostly human, but the mouth was filled with sharp triangular teeth lined up in deep rows. Much like the teeth of a shark. Caxton had seen such teeth before, seen what they were capable of. A vampire could tear a man’s arm off at the socket with one bite. With another it could take his head. Vampires, real vampires, didn’t nibble on the necks of nubile young virgins. They tore people to pieces and sucked blood out of the chunks.
The lower jaw had fallen away from the rest of the skull and dropped to one side. Caxton glanced down and saw the rest of the bones lying jumbled in the bottom of the coffin, only approximately in the positions they’d once held. She grabbed at the intact rib cage and lifted it up even as Montrose grabbed at her arms and tried to pull her away.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? That’s College property!”
She glared at him. She was trained in hand-to-hand combat and could easily have broken his wrists to get free of his grasp, but it didn’t come to that. When he saw the look in her eyes he took an involuntary step back. She didn’t have to work hard to summon up real, blistering anger. She had only to think about Malvern and her brood.
He tried to match her withering gaze, but didn’t have it in him. Eventually he looked away, his eyes darting to the left, and she knew he wouldn’t interfere again. She reached back into the coffin and lifted the rib cage once more. She reached between the cold bones, her fingers tracing the lines of the sternum and the xiphoid process, tapping on the knobby vertebrae. She didn’t find what she was looking for.
The heart was missing.
Vampires possessed many gifts the living could not match. They were stronger, much faster, and they were nearly invulnerable to physical damage. If you cut a vampire’s arm off he could grow a new one while you watched. If you fired an entire clip of bullets into his face he would just laugh and hold you down while his teeth and eyes grew back. The heart of a vampire was its only weak spot. It took blood, the stolen blood of humans, to regrow damaged tissues and heal those injuries, and without a heart a vampire could not regenerate. When the heart was destroyed the vampire was dead.
Whoever had buried so many vampires under Gettysburg had been smart enough to make sure they stayed buried.
In the cold cavern her relief felt like warmth spreading through her numb fingers and toes. It felt like coming back to life, to reality, like waking up from a nightmare. She would need to check every coffin, of course, defile every piece of College property in the cavern, because she had to make sure. But it looked like the world was safe again.
She rubbed at her face with her hands. Her whole body tingled with adrenaline. Slowly she stood up straight and looked at Montrose again.
“Listen,” he said, “I’ve tried to be helpful here. But I really do need to bring my people back and start the real work of cataloging this place and—”
Caxton held up one hand. “We won’t keep you much longer. I just have to make sure these bodies are truly dead. That means looking at all of them.” She walked down one of the rows, holding out her hand over each of the coffins she passed. Each of them gave her the same cold feeling she’d gotten from the first. It seemed vampire bones were unnatural even in true death. She wondered if Montrose could feel it or if it was something only she could perceive. “I’ll try to be gentler with the other ones.”
Something occurred to her then. She looked back and counted coffins, then looked to either side. Four of the rows had twenty coffins each. The row she was looking at was short a coffin. It had only nineteen.
“There are ninety-nine coffins here,” she said. It irked her, but just a little. Why weren’t there an even hundred? Of course she had no idea why the coffins were there in the first place, or how many vampires there had once been. It just seemed a little odd. “I count ninety-nine.”
“Ninety-nine intact, yeah,” Montrose said. He waved her over to the other side of the cavern. She stepped over a coffin to reach him and couldn’t help but feel a little jolt of fear that it would open as she passed overhead and that the skeleton inside would rear up to grab her. She walked over to meet him and looked down at the end of the row. There had been another coffin there at some time, for an even hundred. Now there was just a pile of broken wood. The lid was reduced nearly to splinters, while the sides of the coffin looked as if they’d been smashed apart with a sledgehammer. There were no bones inside, nor any sign of occupation. The wood did not register cold when she ran her hand over it.
“Did you find it like this?” she asked.
He nodded. “We were surprised we didn’t find more of them like it. If this place really is a hundred and forty- one years old, you’d expect a lot more damage over time. Normally with a big tomb like this you find signs of
